Blue outlined spine tattoo of stacked vertebrae across the centre of a back, glowing under ultraviolet light.

Glowing spine tattoo across the back

Back · Colour · Photo

The image shows a spine of stacked vertebrae drawn as blue outlines across the centre of a person's back. The linework is continuous and detailed, with each bone's processes and rounded body clearly defined. The ink glows bright blue under ultraviolet light against a dark background, and the composition is centred and vertical with the shoulders and neck partly visible.

Back Spine Skeleton Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's dark past the second bulb. Dad always said you could find your way round any ghost train blind, so long as you knew where the spine ran. That's what I told the owner's boy when he asked why I'd spent three weeks on one skeleton when the others took an afternoon each. He wanted cheap bones. I wanted the right ones.

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The paint came in a tin from a shop in Lancaster that shut the year after. It was yellowish on the lid and turned blue under the lamp in the back room, the colour of a gas ring. I traced the spine from my father's old anatomy book, the page with the lumbar stack, every bone drawn with little hooks on the processes. I pinned it to the wall of the paint shed and worked from it with a fine brush, one bone, then the next, counting under my breath the way he used to when he taught me the names.

The ride closed in 1978 and the carriages went to a scrapyard in Fleetwood. Nobody thought to strip the walls of the tunnel. Last winter the new owners pulled down the old hoarding and I went in with a lamp I'd bought off the internet, because I wanted to see if it still worked. It did. The bones came up on the brickwork, blue as the sea at dusk, every process and every hook, all the way up to the ceiling where the light couldn't reach.

I stood there a long while with the torch off. Then I swung the lamp to the bottom of the column and found the last bone near the floor, and in the corner beside it my own name, painted small in the same blue, where I'd signed it for him in 1961 so he'd know which bones were mine.